September 26 - It's my birthday and I can cook if I want to

The Birthday Girl

Well we love a good excuse to try a new recipe and Mark had seen a Jamie Does Marrakech show about 6 weeks before. It had several beautiful slow food dishes and we also have a fantastic Moroccan cookbook which we purchased years ago by chance in Darwin. We've made many lovely dishes from it over the years.

Iain & Helen

After having a quite chilly September with drizzle, very cold mornings and some lovely blue cloudless days, we just got absolute magic weather for my birthday. The day after the first drawn Grand Final in 30 yrs, we all spent a wonderful lazy afternoon on the roof and almost got sunburn in the 23 degree weather!

Kaarin & Nina

Mark and I ended up preparing, marinating and chopping for nearly 1.5 days in between watching the football and going out to Sydney Road, brunwick to find all sorts of specialty Lebanese/ Moroccan / Middle Eastern ingredients.
We ended up with the following menu:
- raw veggies (a la Harrod's Lebanese restaurant) which we remembered from 5 yrs ago
- lamb shoulder with Thyme, Rosemary, Garlic and Coriander (cooked for 4 hrs)
- chicken tagine with preserved lemon, cumin and ginger (Cooked for 2 hrs)
- saffron fish balls in tomato sauce
- beetroot and cumin salad
- Spicy prawns

The food

We also ended up purchasing a lovely Baklava inspired desert in Brunswick as we couldn't find edible rose petals to go in Jamie Oliver's version from the TV show!

Lori & Markus

At 8pm we finally crashed after cleaning up everything - oh no, work tomorrow, where did the weekend go?